Contrary to my previous report, you can still find the installation package in the usual “Oracle BEA” media pack, and the installers sit alongside all the others:

Still painfully missing is Publisher, which technically isn’t supported on the new Windows platforms (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008). And since Publisher needs to reside in the same database as the portal, well, this stack still isn’t “fully supported” if your IT department is nagging you to get your existing portal stack off Windows Server 2003 or SQL Server 2005. I’m still looking for an official (or unofficial) response from Oracle on this oversight: we know Publisher is end-of-life’d, but are we at least going to get the existing Publisher 6.5 binaries certified on these platforms? Or is the official party line that we HAVE to move to UCM? And if so, where are the migration tools?

Oh, and while we’re “nitpicking” (if you could call such a glaring omission “nitpicking”), Brad mentions that he’s been informed there are over 200 bug fixes. Sooo… why isn’t Oracle providing a list of significant fixes in this release like they have in every past release? I mean, the release notes list 36 “known issues”, but has no “resolved issues” section. Strange, huh?

Today Oracle announced WCI 10gR4 through their blog and tech network. The problem is: the download isn’t available yet, and there’s already some conflicting information out there.

Following the instructions on the download page, you can see that you’re no longer supposed to find the download via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud using the “Oracle BEA” Media pack, but the “Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3) Media Pack”.

No 10.3.3 yet:

Aside from the conflicting information about the version being available and not being there, there’s more conflicting info after the break. Stay tuned, though, as I’m sure this’ll all be worked out soon, and we’ll keep you posted on new features and functionality!

Analytics is still a bit of a mystery. Here and here, the version for WebCenter Interaction is 10gR4 (aka 10.3.3.0.0), and WebCenter Collaboration is 10.3.3.0.0, but WebCenter Analytics is 10.3.0.2.0. Fine, so Analytics didn’t get a full point release, that’s OK, right? The problem is, the Certification Matrix shows that Windows Server 2008 isn’t supported:
.

But, the online release notes say that Windows Server 2008 is supported. So here’s to hoping that’s just an oversight, and when we go to update our full Plumtree stack, we’re not going to be stuck with running Analytics on Windows Server 2003.

Even if Analytics is supported on the latest OS, there’s a bigger problem here. You’ll notice that Publisher is conspicuously absent – is THAT going to be supported in Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008? I’m glad to see the new software is backwards-compatible with the older platforms, but almost every WCI customer from the Plumtree and BEA ALUI days uses Publisher. And Publisher has to connect to the WCI database. So if Publisher isn’t certified to run on the newer version of Windows or SQL Server, then where does that leave us if we want to do a platform upgrade of OS and DB?

I really hope for those clients who would like to do a full platform upgrade that we’re not going to have to deal with a Frankenvironment until there’s a Spaces migration plan.

It’s true:  Plumtree has a checkered past in delivering us to the promised land of user-generated content in the early noughties – to say nothing of the Enterprise 2.0 (Social Networking) trend of the past couple of years.  The WebCenter Suite promises to start getting us there, and there are unconfirmed rumors of WebCenter Collaboration Server getting this much-needed functionality, but for now user-generated content remains largely a pipe dream for those clients still on the WebCenter Interaction stack.

We all have blogs and wikis, so why haven’t we seen a serious contender for one of these products to work well in the WebCenter Interaction stack?  The answer is maybe that we’re looking for too tight of a coupling from Oracle:  the reality is that if you follow the Four Tenets of Portal Integration, you can provide a pretty compelling and integrated experience for your users, which is exactly what we’re doing with this blog and demonstration site:  notice how the URLs of this site change as you click through the tabs at the top?  That’s because some pages come from WebCenter Interaction, and some from WordPress – but the user (that’s you!) is none the wiser.  Administrators (that’s me!) love it:  in addition to the insanely easy setup and configuration and the vast library of third party plugins that can do pretty much anything and everything you might need, there’s also an almost comically easy upgrade process:

That’s right, WordPress knows when it’s out of date, and prompts you to update. Seven seconds after clicking “upgrade Automatically”, we’re all done:

Try upgrading WCI in 7 seconds!

Oh, and while this blog isn’t demonstrating integrated search or authentication, we’ve got that too…

If you’re currently running an old version of BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI 6.1 or 6.5), and are moving servers, setting up a dev environment, or otherwise find yourself with License Keys that longer working due to IP address restrictions, Oracle has been kind enough to publish unlimited licenses keys for the entire ALUI stack.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the product is now free – you’re still required to pay for licensing and maintenance if you want to upgrade – but if you’re compliant with the licensing you’ve got, this is the easy way to get things working again.

• WebEdit does not work on IE8. (9723488)
• Error in task submenu in IE8 (9712774)
• Cannot upload multiple files in Collab (9274372)
• Bulk upload JRE updated to 1.6 in order to support IE8 (8760280)
• Notifications should be sent from a fixed address for creation and deletion (9647426) This fix involves updates to both collab and notification components.
• Subscription to project overview causes conflicts with Immedate Subscriptions (8759642)
• Non gatewayed webedit does not work (9434805)
• File leak in Search Service during search index rebuild (11726008)
• Webcenter Collaboration notifications to large numbers of recipients fail (9484113)

Oh, and while I never got around to writing a post about this, for those of you that are into this kind of stuff, this update includes a new cns.war file – and someone in engineering has removed the .jars containing some of the CNS source code.  So if you want to take a peek, check out the code in your cns.war before updating.

Guess you’ll have to find some other way to meet your code analysis needs…

We all know Oracle’s stated direction on WebCenter Interaction, a.k.a Plumtree, a.k.a. ALUI, a.k.a WCI: While it’s had some promising adoption news within Oracle, it’s pretty clear “the ‘tree” is on its way out in favor of the WebCenter Suite.

If you need any further evidence that WCI is not long for this world, take a look at the just-released webinar that Oracle gave this week: Oracle WebCenter Suite – Giving Users a Modern Experience.

Now for the good news (and the crux of this post’s title): We are not a forgotten user community:

… and, as Oracle stated in that webinar, the long-promised Oracle 10.3.3 patch release is coming soon.  No formal release date, but it seems we aren’t going to be left completely in the cold; this patch release focuses mostly on integrating with the rest of the Oracle stack to make the transition less painful – if you choose to continue drinking the Oracle Kool-Aid.

Any way you cut it, this transition isn’t going to be easy, and is likely going to feel like “starting over”.  I mean, how many times did we hear Oracle emphasize how long it would take their own services group to make the transition in that webinar?  A LOT – I counted them (no, I didn’t): there were at least eleventy-two.

The reality, though, is that these types integrations take time – and sometimes, lots of it.  As evidence of this, look no further than Aqualogic Analytics.  When BEA acquired Plumtree, one of the gaping holes in WLP was Analytics, or usage reporting of the product.  Plumtree Analytics was becoming a solid product, but it was very tightly integrated into the Plumtree portal.  So the decision was made to try and abstract some of the major pieces out, with the thinking that these abstractions could be useful elsewhere.  For example, the ill-fated Security Services (once used by the also ill-fated PEP line and now just built into Analytics) and the existing Directory Services came of this integration attempt.  The idea was that by abstracting out security and user management:

1. These services would be available to other applications that were developed down the line
2. Analytics would be more compatible with WebLogic Portal, which also had an LDAP repository to access user and group information

While I think that if more time had been available for the integration to become more seamless, the problem is that no one won in this attempt because it was aborted too early.  I have no idea whether WLP still supports Analytics integration, the old Security Services are now just built into the product as a phenomenally complicated set of DB tables that make little sense, and Directory Services are a dramatically inefficient way to access user and group information.

Case in point – I’ve had a couple of clients report Analytics timeouts for some users, but other users were seeing the proper report:

How does this relate to the whole Plumtree/BEA/Oracle integration saga? The old Plumtree Analytics application used a SQL query called something like QUERY_USER_FLATTENED_GROUPS.  Basically, this was a Plumtree Portal-specific SQL query that, given a user ID, would spit out all nested groups that that user was a member of.  So if a user was a member group A, and Group A was a member of Group B, the query would return both Group A and B.

The ALUI version of Analytics, though, utilized Directory Services so that group membership didn’t need to come from PT-specific SQL queries.  It could come from generic LDAP queries.  The problem is, LDAP doesn’t have a mechanism like QUERY_USER_FLATTENED_GROUPS, so for any given user, Analytics needs to query LDAP for the groups a user is in.  And then, Analytics needs to check to see which groups THOSE groups are a member of.  And so on, and so on.  You’d be surprised – through inheritance, you may be a member of thousands of groups, and rather than a single SQL query, you’re now dealing with tens of thousands of LDAP calls.

Bottom line:  Integrations and product convergence can work, but they’re phenomenally complicated, because every piece of abstraction added can cause unanticipated side effects.  Which is probably why Oracle is taking this whole process pretty slowly.

Full Bug Report after the break for your convenience.

*** 04/15/10 03:33 pm ***
  BUG TYPE CHOSEN
  ===============
  Code
�
  Product: Oracle WebCenter Analytics (5388)
  ==========================================
  Problem Description
  ===================
  The WebCenter Analytics Console community in the WebCenter Interaction
(WCI)
  portal loads slowly or experiences a timeout when the user accessing the
  product is a member of many portal groups, especially if membership is
  gained through nested groups-in-groups. For example, a user with less than
  200 group memberships loads Analytics in 7 seconds while a user with
  more than 1000 direct group memberships loads Analytics in 84 seconds and
  a user with more than 1000 group memberships through nested
groups-in-groups
  loads Analytics in 136 seconds. By contrast, all three users can load a
  simple WCI community in a few seconds.
�
  Steps to reproduce
  =========================
  1. Create a WCI user with access to Analytics but only grant them
     membership in a few groups.
  2. Create a WCI user with access to Analytics and grant them membership in
     more than 1000 groups directly with no groups-in-groups.
  3. Create a WCI user with access to Analytics and grant them membership in
     in nested groups-in-groups that yield membership in more than 1000
groups
     total.
  4. Test loading Analytics console with each user.
  5. Test loading a simple WCI community with each user.

  Expected Behavior
  =================
  The time to verify activity rights to Analytics should be similar to checks
  for other portal resources.
�
  Workarounds
  ==========
  Increase the portlet timeout in the Analytics webservices in WCI portal
    administration.
  Consolidate groups to reduce the number of total memberships per user.
  Reduce groups-in-groups nesting.
�
  Stack Trace or Diagnostic Data
  ===========    �
  Portal spy logs will show a long pause while at the same time Analytics
ALUI
  Security spy logs many LDAP requests and ALUI Directory spy logs thousands
  of database queries.
*** 04/15/10 03:35 pm ***
*** 04/16/10 01:53 pm ***
Documented in My Oracle Support Knowledge Base Note 979305.1
*** 04/19/10 12:44 pm *** (CHG: Asg->NEW OWNER OWNER)

Since Oracle now owns these product stacks, there are three “portal” offerings – and, if you buy the Oracle WebCenter Suite, you own them all:

1. Weblogic Portal.  Built as a set of APIs that allowed developers to create portal applications in Eclipse on top of WebLogic Server, this was a powerful set of libraries that provided a great environment for Java shops to code their web interfaces to back-end applications.
2. AquaLogic User Interaction (aka WebCenter Interaction).  Built as an out-of-the-box portal, the Plumtree application was designed to be open and flexible, but more for mixed (.NET/Java, Oracle/SQL Server) shops to configure the web interfaces to their applications.
3. WebCenter Spaces.  This is basically Oracle’s “portal”, which provides a web-based UI to access various social networking and personal productivity (read: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking) features provided by WebCenter Services.

I can’t profess to know the exact plans that Oracle has here, but it seems pretty clear to most outside observers (and most insiders I’ve spoken to): WebLogic Portal and WebCenter Interaction will continue to be supported for years to come, but Oracle is throwing its weight behind WebCenter Spaces.  This has a couple of implications for legacy Plumtree customers:

1. Oracle is going down the path that the Weblogic Portal took – while a lot of the functionality you need (such as Collaborative and Social tools) will be available out of the box through WebCenter Services, you will be doing most of your customizations with Java in jDeveloper.
2. If you’re a .NET shop, you need to brace yourself for a huge learning curve, or consider looking at other platforms, such as SharePoint, or a hybrid solution using tools like Confluence, WordPress, and some glue that holds the pieces together.
3. There still is no formal migration plan for getting from WCI to Spaces.  Although Oracle has promised it for some time, a migration will not be a one-click process, so when you’re evaluating what to do “after WCI” – whether you’re Java or .NET – consider ALL available options, as a migration from WCI to Spaces could be as complicated as just “starting over”.
4. Each of the individual products in the stack has its own migration path.  For example, WCI configurations will need to be migrated to WebCenter Spaces, Publisher content will need to be migrated to Oracle Universal Content Manager (UCM), and Collaboration and Studio will need to be migrated to their equivalent WebCenter Services.

Regardless of what path you choose, at this point it’s pretty clear:  you need to start thinking about a long-term strategy in a post-Plumtree world.  As a vendor-agnostic consulting firm, Integryst can help you choose your way – or help implement whatever technology you’ve ultimately chosen.

The purpose of “Master Notes” is to “provide the most important links that users will need to install and support the product”, and there are some pretty decent pages in there if you know where to look.  For example, the IDK Master Note is a collection of a bunch of documentation, KB articles, known issues, and bug fixes all in one place.

But what I really wanted to highlight here is the Webinars provided by Oracle Support – with one in particular being the best Oracle Webinar I’ve seen: the Search Webinar, by Eno Gjerasi.  Eno shows that there’s still life left from the Plumtree support group, and demonstrates a level of knowledge of the Search Server that rivals most engineers or consultants.  There was one tip in particular that I’ll focus on in upcoming posts (about how to communicate directly with Search), but I encourage you to check out all three Webinars (Search, Portal / SSO, and Analytics) and the other Master Notes – you may just find a gem in there and wonder how you made it all these years without knowing “that one thing” you never knew you needed.

Keep up the good work, Oracle support!

If you’ve sweated through SQL*Plus sessions for way too long, definitely check this tool out – it’s cheap, at only $40.  If you’ve got a better tool for quick and easy Oracle DB queries, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!